creative with corks

In case you didn’t know this about me, I have a small love affair with wine. White wine especially. Dessert wines too. Okay, honestly, I’m willing to try anything labeled wine at least once. Needless to say, there are usually a couple wine corks relaxing on the counter as a reminder of our last vino taste encounter.

So when I decided to team up with 49 other Kid Blogger Network bloggers to bring you Craftulate’s Ultimate Guide to 50 Craft Materials where we’re each focusing on a specific craft material, corks were a natural choice for me.

What I found out when brainstorming kid cork crafts, is that my husband may just be more creative than me. Yikes! Not only did my wonderful hubby cut wine corks for me at 1 a.m., but also gave me 20+ ideas that the boys and I could do together. Unfortunately, we didn’t have time to try them all (yet), but here are some super easy and fun cork crafts and activities for you and your kiddos to enjoy!

The first thing I did to introduce the boys to our cork crafts was give them some free play time. I gave them a couple bins with corks. They were tickled! They lined them up to make fences and sat them up like buildings and played with the corks (and grandma & grandpa)!

And since we are a boy house, of course the construction trucks came out for some heavy duty pushing and plowing!

My hubby had cut some of the corks in half to make hay bales so we sat up the farm!

Then came our craft time. We started off making simple cork butterflies by layering two colored hearts (of different sizes) and adhering them to the cork. Even our littlest guy (18-months old) was tickled with this easy craft!

Then we made pepperoni pizza. The boys colored a paper plate with a red crayon for the sauce. Then they smeared up the plate with a glue stick and covered it with two tones of yellow shredded paper for the cheese. After I put a glue dot on each ¼” cut cork, they placed it on the plate. Finally, we got out the good ol’ dabber and red paint to complete. These looked awesome!

Next came the boys’ favorite activity… cork painting! They used the dabbers to stamp and smear paint on their blank canvases only to make beautiful masterpieces.

While the big boys were painting, we sat the littlest one in his high chair with a quick sensory bin of some of our art supplies. He had fun feeling the smooth corks and discovering some of their rough ends, played with craft sticks (and realized they weren’t the best choice of chew toys), and loved the paint brushes we gave him!

And to conclude our creativity with corks, I made a tic-tac-toe board with reusable game pieces!

Surprisingly enough, mommy didn’t even have a corked beverage during all this craft time!

What fun cork crafts and activities have you done? Please link them up here!

Nadia, even if you are not a wine drinker, ask friends who are to save their corks for you. From the time I signed up for Craftulate’s Ultimate Guide of Craft Materials to the time I wrote this, my cork supply was sparse (we either saved them in our special occasion cork jar or tossed them). These corks are actually from my mother-in-law and aunt! And there are soooooo many fun things to do with corks… even adult crafts!